By Sammy Ketz
After years on the run from Shia and Sunni militias and morality police, Iraqi musicians are slowly returning to the streets of Baghdad, looking to fill the silence left by the fading civil war.
'The Mahdi Army and al-Qaeda only ever agreed on one point - that we are servants of the devil,' said 37-year-old Mohammed Rashid a music shop owner in the Fadel neighbourhood of central Baghdad.
In the back of his office hang the portraits of a saxophone player and a tambourine player, both murdered by the Mahdi Army's Shia militiamen in early 2006 at the height of Iraq's grisly sectarian violence.
'At his home in Sadr City and in front of his children, they killed and burned the corpse of my saxophone player, Ayad Hair. On the same day, they took Ali Mohammed and killed him. His corpse was found more than two years later.'
'They explained to their families that this will be the fate of all those who transgress holy law,' said Rashid, who reopened his shop earlier this year.
He faced similar harassment from al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni extremist movement loyal to Osama bin Laden that has launched scores of attacks across the country targeting Shia civilians and US-led security forces.
'In March 2006, after they took over the neighbourhood, a group of masked jihadists destroyed my shop,' he said. The trumpets and drum covers still bear the jagged scrapes left by the vandals.
'What you are doing is forbidden, because music is the work of the devil,' Rashid remembers the assailants telling him before he fled to Syria. 'If you reopen your shop, you are dead.'
The neighbourhood was once famous for its traditional music groups, bands of drummers, trumpet and timpani players that would accompany a groom to his bride, cater to circumcision celebrations, and herald major holidays.
But under the strict interpretation of Islamic law imposed by al-Qaeda on the areas it controlled, musicians were considered a threat to morality, along with alcohol vendors, barbers and women who did not cover their hair.
When the ban on music was first announced the owners of seven shops on the street complained to the local al-Qaeda strongman.
'It is an order from God, he will provide for your needs,' the man replied, according to Abdel Karim Rashid, a 34-year-old trumpet player who was reduced to selling fruit juice to survive the group's radical Islamist rule.
He did not take up his instrument again until mid-October 2007, when a local Sunni militia allied to US-led forces drove al-Qaeda from the neighbourhood.
He remembers rushing outside and blowing a song of celebration into the surrounding alleyways. 'It was liberation. We were drunk with joy. I thought I had risen from the dead.'
Hussein al-Basri, the head of Iraq's artists union, says there were more than 300 traditional bands playing in Baghdad on the eve of the US-led invasion in March 2003 but most of them stopped playing in 2004.
Since then around 50 musicians have been killed, and the number of active bands has dwindled to around 100, he said.
Music is still a dangerous profession in some parts of the country.
Eight months ago an orchestral group that had travelled to the southern town of Aziziyah was attacked by the Mahdi Army, which destroyed their instruments.
In the Allawi district of central Baghdad, Ahmed Omar Magid, 27, whose father played in the royal symphony in 1954 during the reign of King Faisal II, suffered the same treatment at the hands of Sunni fighters.
'They were an intrusion in our lives. They wanted to impose a culture without joy, but Iraqis enjoy the good life, and they love music,' he said.
Magid plays eight different instruments for 170 dollars a night and his six bands perform at around a dozen weddings a month.
'Many artists have fled the country but some are beginning to return,' he said.
His neighbour Ali Kassem, a 40-year-old who used to play trumpet in a military band, is planning to perform at a party with his two teenage sons.
'We have had some really rough times! I have friends who were killed when they showed up to play for fake weddings set up as ambushes,' he said.
'And yet I am sure that nothing in the Koran forbids our art.'
